Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register

by Ann Larson

In the tradition of bestselling classics such as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Benjamin Lorr’s The Secret Life of Groceries comes a character-driven exploration of the modern supermarket, unpacking what works and what doesn’t, and delivering a blueprint for a better way to shop.

Unemployed and looking for work during the pandemic, journalist and activist Ann Larson found a job as a cashier at a supermarket in Utah. Though she had written about low-wage work for years, nothing could have prepared her for what she experienced.

Informed by her time behind the register, Cleanup on Aisle Five is Larson’s deep dive into supermarkets and how they operate from the inside from the low-wage workers stocking the shelves and the customers coming through at all hours, to the communities these stores serve and the larger capitalist forces and corporate interests at play that control how we shop for food. In the process, she chronicles the evolution of the grocery store, unpacks the political implications of the battles between shoppers and staff, and invites us to imagine grocery stores as places where one can foster community and even equity—if we can separate food distribution from profit motive.

Deeply reported and refreshingly insightful, Larson follows the interactions between the workers, including Stanley who can’t afford a sandwich, Nick who doesn’t have health insurance, and Scarlet who is all out of patience, and customers, including the old lady who finds comfort in tidying the shelves to the one homeless guy who only comes in to use the facilities. From the unforgettable characters to the common challenges we face when it comes to food, Cleanup in Aisle Five will forever change the way we look at grocery stores.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Audiobook, Sociology, Business, Social Justice, Labor

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 9, 2026

Reviews

[Pamela]

The author, Ann Larson, found herself needing a job just as the pandemic began. Despite having several degrees no one was hiring, except at essential places like the grocery store. Larson was able to hire in at a supervisor level for the front-end, overseeing the cashiers.

What started as an article turned into this book. Which means the book is not quite the cohesive narrative with a driving force of a premise. Larson provides instead a retelling of her own experiences working at a grocery supermarket.

There are many interesting points in the book about how people are treated, how the job affects them physically, and the author's response to demands by management. Larson sides with the workers whenever possible. It's a low paying, high turnover job that's very demanding, particularly physically. One cannot help but sympathize with the employees trying to manage pain while doing a job that is physically demanding.

Larson ends the book with ways that grocery stores can do better for their employees. Better pay to start with, but also better health care would certainly help as well. It’s hard to say what customers can do to help, but perhaps not using the self-checkout machines? It’s worth reading this book just for her experiences with these machines. Unfortunately, they seem to be multiplying instead of diminishing.


Thanks to Atria-One Signal Publishers and NetGalley for an uncorrected electronic advance review copy of this book. However, I listened to a published audiobook copy of the book.

[Jon Stanton]

I worked in a supermarket when I was in college. I made about $7 an hour in the late 90's and early 2000's. I worked for a good company, but certainly the pay was pretty minimal for the amount of work required. I started as a cashier, and eventually worked my way into the customer service department and "cash office" (i.e. "bankers" in the book's parlance). I mostly enjoyed the work and my colleagues.

I read the book with great interest because I had worked in a supermarket. I knew what the work was like. Yes, my feet hurt (a lot) at the end of the day, even though we had "fatigue pads" underneath us. I don't recall back or arm pain from scanning, but I was quite young at the time. My dad also worked in grocery stores for most of his life, supplementing his wage as a small-church pastor. At one time, nearly my entire family worked in grocery stores. My brother once chopped part of his finger off on a saw in the meat room.

Customers could be friendly or extremely rude. However, I think it was a lot less likely at the time to be rude since we still had a relatively civil society at the time.

All of that to say, this book reveals the inside scoop on what it's like to work in a supermarket. People (customers) don't always think about the toll on the body, the toll on the mind/emotions, and other issues (like the "sweep alert she describes in the book") supermarket employees deal with. Thankfully, I worked in an era before self-checkout. I have no idea how one clerk manages all the problems at multiple checkouts like that.

It's a great book if you're interested in learning more about how the low-income workforce survives (or doesn't) in this society. We take advantage of these people every day. The corporations get richer and richer while the average worker gets poorer and poorer. Minimum wage jobs were once intended for high schoolers and maybe college kids who needed some extra cash. Unfortunately, corporations are more interested in shareholders than they are in humanity. I'm grateful that I worked for a local supermarket who took care of its employees pretty well.

[Meghan]

Ann Larson's book "Cleanup on Aisle Five" is a quick read that packs a punch. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Larson wasn't able to find work in her field (academia and advocacy), so she took a job at an anonymous grocery story. (She refers to it as TGS - The Grocery Store.)

One thing that stands out to me in this book is the pain. The chronic pain that almost all grocery store workers suffer due to standing all day and repetitive, strenuous movements. The book ends a bit suddenly, but suggests change to public policy as well as steps that corporations could take to ensure better conditions for workers.

4 stars.

I received a copy of this book complimentary from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

[cursedb]

What I found most valuable about this book is how it shows that the idea of the “essential worker” didn’t disappear when the pandemic ended. The pandemic may have made these workers temporarily visible, but the conditions that made their labor essential never really went away. And yet, the recognition and meaningful changes that came with that visibility seem to have disappeared just as quickly. Because this is a memoir, we’re not just reading an argument about essential workers. We’re reading about the author’s own experiences, which makes the subject feel much more immediate and personal. I think that’s what makes this book so powerful. It puts a human face on a conversation that is often reduced to statistics, policies, and headlines.
It also made me think about how easily workers’ well-being is overlooked, particularly in the United States, but this is certainly not an issue limited to one country. The pandemic briefly forced us to acknowledge how dependent society is on people whose labor is often undervalued, underpaid, or taken for granted. Yet very little seems to have fundamentally changed since then.
I think this is a subject that deserves much more attention, especially because “essential worker” is not simply a pandemic-era category. These people are still essential. Their work still keeps society functioning. The fact that we no longer talk about them with the same urgency says a lot about how quickly public attention moves on once a crisis is over. I found this book genuinely valuable, and I’m actually planning to use some of its ideas and observations in my own research. More than anything, it left me thinking about the gap between recognizing someone’s labor as essential and actually recognizing the person doing that labor as worthy of dignity, security, and care. I really think more people should read this.

[BethFishReads]

Really a 3.5.

The author reflects on her experiences working as a supervisor at a major grocery store in Utah.

Larson, as many others around the world, lost her job during COVID. Returning to Utah, she found a job at a major supermarket. Although she had no experience working at a grocery, she ended up as a Front End supervisor, likely thanks to her education and work resume.

Larson uses a conversational, personal approach to reveal just how difficult it is to work at the front of a grocery store. She tells stories of how she and other employees were exploited and often worked to a state of exhaustion, all for a wage that barely paid the rent and for a company that restricted workers' hours so they didn't have to offer health insurance.

Almost all of her fellow workers suffered from repetitive stress injuries and bad backs, dealt with hostile customers, and struggled to meet their bosses' expectations. Many of the stories Larson shares underscore how it's possible--in the United States--for a person to have a job and still fail to make ends meet. She also muses about why she felt stymied every time she thought about encouraging the workers to organize or unionize.

If you've never worked retail or with the public, this book will likely be an eye-opener. Those of us who have worked similar jobs, will be nodding along. In any case, this memoir will increase your empathy for the people who make it possible for you to buy your food.

Thanks to Atria for the review copy.

[Jillian Eliza]

Interesting, but a tad repetitive.

[Kristen]

The author shines a light on the working poor. Everyone should have an opportunity to access basic needs such as food and healthcare. I appreciate the author pulling back the curtain to bring awareness to this issue. However, a good chunk of the book felt like it was a list of what author did in a day. I would have enjoyed this more if it had more investigative journalism and less memoir.

[Ari Damoulakis]

You will get a review now-now. Quickly going out for pizza. But an incredibly good, inciteful and sad sort of book. Pure capitalism and the rich really do mostly take advantage of poor in America, don’t know if just bad regulations in some Southern states or is thing the experience mostly all over there?
Anyway, now-now proper review.
Ny pizza comes before you haha.
So the audio book narration is very good.
Anna, I think she graduated in Journalism.
She was going to just make and try publish this as a series of articles but then realized this subject needed a book.
I agree.
She lives in, this book takes place in Utah.
I don’t know much about worker’s rights there, but want to look into that.
So Anna calls the store TS g, the grocery store.
Now before, Anna goes shopping there. She sees it from the outside, the community, comradeship and friendliness of the staff, so she thinks this job will be interesting, let’s try.
So she starts as a cashier, but applies to be trained as a supervisor.
So then the book is divided into chapters such as the community (that is to say workers), shoppers (that is to say us customers), that sort of thing.
I believe, from the book’s descriptions of the shop, in South Africa , I would think this store sounds akin in what it sells to Checkers or Food Lovers Market, not like a Makro.
It is, I find it insane that a shop closes at 10 in the evening.
We don’t have that. 5, 6, or at a stretch 8.
Anyway it is really a sort of frustrating and shocking experience reading this.
Anna wishes she could organise and form a sort of union, but she knows wouldn’t work, even though she has organising experience.
So there is a lot to unpack.
We meet many different characters like Security Guard George, Manager Paula, young cashier just 19, old cashiers where the disgracefulness really shows, as in, you are well over retirement age, you’ve even had a sort of stroke, but you have to carry on working.
There is some community, for example, the store staff comforts a gay cashier when a customer abuses him for that.
There other instances of that, but I am not remembering at the moment.
At the same time, you get to the differences chapter and you see the coercion, divide and rule, and laughable tactics, some of them, the store puts in place for total control and to really give lowranking employees a hard time.
Despite inflation, cashier wages haven’t increased for ages.
Anna becomes a supervisor and her wage, even though she hasn’t worked there for long, is higher than people who habe been working there for years.
Staff are paid by the hour.
Coming in or going out uses biometrics so the number of hours can’t be cheated.
Supervisors even time toilet breaks because they have to give account if management thinks they are taking too long.
They earn so little that cashiers often ask for more hours so they can afford sometimes dinner.
The security guard does not inderstand how a person can even sabe to take a holiday.
The cashiers can’t even try go to college or study, not just because of the physical demands their job exhausts their body, but, the store is so barbaric, they don’t allow cashiers to read a book at the counter.
There is a section on self-service cashier machines, but I can’t say anything about those, we don’t have that here.
The most insulting and disgraceful bits are when the management offers Appreciation Weeks.
It is far from that.
Instead of raising wages, they just have cashier of the month, and the prize is laughably small and ridiculous, like only $10 gift voucher.
Appreciation days are even worse.
Self-love cards are shown to cashiers with advice that, like Anna points out, would benefit the store, but cashiers struggle to keep anyway, like get a good 8 hours of sleep.
They also bring in mindfulness experts.
I am now not remembering, but other examples on the self-love bingo cards totally pathetic and unhelpful.
The biggest insults for me were the raffles.
I mean, disgusting, as in, main prizes were things like a $5 deli voucher, a box of pasta, so on.
My point is, shouldn’t the main prize at least be a whole meal from the deli?
The more you read these books, the more you do believe that much of the very rich class believe in social Darwinism in America and really look down on the poor in society.
Oh and the shop staff really hate people who make their days even longer by coming shopping just before the shop closes and spend time shopping after it is officially closed.
Like she said, cashiers and shopworkers in Europe have a much higher quality of work experience and then more social life and economic ability.
I wrote this detailed review, but I think definitely read the book, this social study.
She also highlights a ridiculous issue where a cashier, a packet of meat was expired, the cashier didn’t steel it, she just marked it down quite a bit, bought it and took it home for dinner.
She was charged with shoplifting and fired.
Also hungry people, like here, the corporates throw away so much old food where they could rather set up schemes for the hungry.
I will still never ever forget in my life, Checkers Hyper used their money and legal team, waste the court’s case time just to prosecute a guy for trying to steel a piece of cheese.
Unemployed guy.
Magistrate asked him why he did it, just answered I was very hungry.’
I myself was there that day, witnessed that.
They are so rich, yet have no empathy or strategy to want to work out a way to give so much fresh food that is expiring or spoiling to the many South Africans, even children, who go hungry to bed most nights.
I want to put a song, I just can’t think of one yet.

[Robin]

Received an advanced digital reading copy from the publisher. To be published in June 2026.

This is an amazing and well-researched study of the working lives and inner workings of a large supermarket. I'll write more later, but for now, I will say I'll never, ever, ever get annoyed at a store cashier again, and I was able to practice that thought when I had a disastrous self-checkout experience yesterday.

[Meghan McGlone]

3.5 ⭐️. i think parts of this were really interesting and i learned a lot about something we all take for granted, which is being served at the grocery store. this was a good perspective on how essential grocery stores are, but something i really didnt process and comprehend until reading this book.

other parts of this felt just like the author had worked a minimum wage job for the first time in her life and was venting about her anger. i think some of these little complaints about the things like clocking in and out, how annoying self checkout machines are, and how people stay in the store until the last minute are just present in the retail and service industry for everyone. so when you complain about these dumb things we all have toiled through then it takes away from the real action items we should be focused on — giving grocery stores workers more dignity, PTO, better healthcare and raises.

overall a good read, it felt like someone took “nickel and dimed” and meshed it with “the secret life of groceries”

[Matt]

As someone who has myself worked both retail and white-collar positions, I wanted to enjoy this more than I did. I greatly respect Larson's work with the Debt Collective, and a book that deconstructs the paradoxical coexistence of abundance and exploitation in the supermarket is certainly compelling. Her unsparing depiction of the everyday mechanisms of corporate domination in the supermarket – just-in-time scheduling, deskilling, etc. – offers a valuable addition to working-class ethnography, capturing well the psychological and physical toll of wage labor. In that sense, it serves as an excellent introductory text for demystifying retail exploitation under late capitalism.

However, despite Larson's apparent understanding of corporate greed and working-class immiseration, she falls into some frustratingly liberal traps at times. One claim she makes would likely be seen by most as a relatively throwaway line, but it frankly irritated me quite a bit:

Fruits and vegetables have a greater environmental impact than other foods because they have to be kept cold over long distances. The idea that we can limit the ravages of climate change through vegetarianism alone is misleading. The key is eating food that is in season and produced or grown close to home.

While Larson is of course correct that individual ethical consumerism or "vegetarianism alone" cannot dismantle systemic climate change, her empirical justification is entirely incorrect. She inexplicably resurrects the thoroughly debunked locavore myth: the idea that "food miles" and transport logistics dictate a product's ecological footprint. Unsurprisingly, she doesn't bother to provide a source to back up this claim; presumably because it has been established for at least decades that food miles make up a minuscule fraction of a food's environmental impact. (See Weber & Matthews 2008 for just one high-profile study.) Larson's claim that chilled fruits and vegetables possess a "greater environmental impact than other foods" completely erases the catastrophic environmental reality of industrial animal agriculture, which accounts for the vast majority of agricultural deforestation and biodiversity loss. I would have preferred she refrain from diving into ecological analysis altogether if she was uninterested in seriously addressing the topic. By promoting an insular, lifestyle-focused environmentalism, she unwittingly undermines the radical conclusions that I believe one should draw from experiences like hers.

[Nicole]

Really interesting part-memoir, part-culture study of one of the most difficult and overlooked categories of retail work. I don’t think I realized how physically brutal a grocery store job is, not even factoring in the COVID-era setting of the book. The author comes to the (correct, IMO) conclusion that major collective action is needed to make these jobs safer and fairer (healthcare, paid leave, accommodations, unions) and that it has to happen on a national or statewide level.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

[Bernadette]

Ann Larson does an incredible job balancing personal anecdotes with deep-dive research into the life of American supermarket workers. Not only does she man the checkstand herself and serve as a Front End supervisor-in-training for a year at a supermarket in Utah, Larson explores the challenges and sometime satisfaction of serving customers in an essential food industry. Larson makes mistakes, sometimes evades the company rules to side with cashiers, and also puts into perspective how the community fostered in mom-and-pop grocery stores still may have some relevance in the corporate supermarket setting. I learned a great deal about the low-wage struggles of employees surrounded by thousands of food choices they themselves cannot afford; how the repetitive, standing work produces health issues that cannot be addressed with the store health insurance plan's super high deductibles. The no-win situation seems to demand unionization but organizing may be mean job loss, Larson comes to realize. A very informative, compelling read that raises many questions.

[Catherine]

An interesting book about the perils of low paid grocery store work and the toll it takes on the people who do it. I was very surprised that Larson left out the double bind of working mothers and the toll low paid hourly labor takes on their children.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos]

The Bill Beneath the Scanner
Ann Larson’s “Cleanup on Aisle Five” finds the hidden cost of abundance in the bodies, hours, and fraying mercy of supermarket workers
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | May 21st, 2026

A supermarket performs a fluorescent vanishing act.

Labor disappears into abundance. Pain disappears into customer service. Time disappears into the clock that will not move. The shopper sees ripe strawberries in February, shrimp trays before the game, twelve kinds of pasta, paper bags waiting under the counter, and a self-checkout station chirping instructions in a voice of synthetic patience. Ann Larson’s “Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register” puts the reader where the scanner, the clock, and the customer all face the body. From the other side of the checkstand, the trick stops looking like magic and starts looking like payroll: convenience has not removed friction. It has sent the drag into someone else’s feet, hands, back, paycheck, schedule, nerves, and judgment.

Larson, a writer and activist, took a cashiering job at a Utah supermarket during the pandemic and found a fluorescent civic understudy: a place to buy milk, use the bathroom, cool down, charge a phone, ask for cash, seek shelter, complain, confess, and occasionally frighten the person paid to say hello. TGS is the store’s disguised name, though the disguise is about as secure as a paper bag in rain. Anyone who has stood in line behind a shopper arguing with a machine will recognize the place. Anyone who has worked the line will recognize it faster.

Its nearest shelf-mates are Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed,” Benjamin Lorr’s “The Secret Life of Groceries,” and Emily Guendelsberger’s “On the Clock.” But Larson keeps opening colder doors than most of them do. Her sharpest subject is not hidden labor alone, though she is especially acute about labor buried in the shopper’s smooth exit. It is override-card ethics: whether to call security, fetch a chair, make someone sweep, void a theft, chase a customer, report a coworker, or let a rule break because the rule was cruel before anyone disobeyed it. Beneath the scenes is a question as practical as a receipt and as large as a politics: what happens to moral judgment when every act of care costs minutes, breaks, cartilage, and risk?

Larson begins where the job begins: in the body. She walks home from opening shifts with legs gone watery, collapses into sleep, dreams of drowning in groceries, eats whatever can be assembled by someone too tired to cook. The early irony is bitter and efficient. A worker surrounded by food is too depleted to feed herself well. The supermarket, that bright civic refrigerator, has plenty in every direction except the one in which the employee has to live.

The incident that first forces the store into focus is grotesque, absurd, and clarifying. A man, unable to access the locked public restroom because the code is given only to paying customers, defecates on the floor. Workers divide. Some see a person in emergency. Others see the janitor who must clean it up. Larson’s instinct is sympathy. A security guard reminds her that sympathy does not mop.

That episode becomes the book’s first training manual. Outside the automatic doors, kindness can remain a clean principle. Inside, kindness has sequence, weight, and cleanup. It delays breaks, lengthens lines, risks reprimand, and asks one tired body to absorb another person’s crisis. Larson’s most durable insight is that exploitation does not only make people poor or sore. It makes compassion expensive.

The structure peels bright retail promises away from the adhesive underneath. The chapters are named for the virtues the store sells back to shoppers as atmosphere: customer service, community, convenience, abundance, autonomy, choice, solidarity, dignity. Each begins as promise and ends as invoice. Customer service becomes smile-work under surveillance. Community becomes an unfunded public square. Convenience becomes a machine that outsources blame. Abundance becomes stocked plenty built from waste, injury, and distance. Autonomy becomes the question of who owns the minutes before closing. Choice becomes the shelf’s decoy freedom. Solidarity becomes powerful, necessary, and too often trapped in unofficial acts of mercy. Dignity becomes not sentiment, but equipment: chairs, wages, schedules, teeth, hearing aids, paid leave, retirement.

“Convenience” is where the comedy and fury lock most cleanly. Self-checkout arrives with the usual corporate bedtime story: faster, easier, modern, helpful. Larson treats that patter as a document with fingerprints all over it. The stations do not eliminate labor; they hand labor to customers in pieces and return blame to workers whole. They glitch, freeze, misprice, reject cards, confuse shoppers, invite theft, and flash for human intervention with the serene entitlement of little bureaucrats with receipt printers. One customer angry at a station calls Larson an idiot. Another accuses her of stealing his gift-card money. The technology is not wicked in itself. The wickedness lies in the arrangement: a machine makes the mistake and waits for a cashier to become the apology.

Larson’s best witnesses are often objects. The override card becomes a wand of borrowed power. The chair becomes contraband mercy. The fingerprint clock becomes the store’s claim on the worker’s body. The sweep buzzer becomes hourly humiliation. The gobacks cart – that holding pen for items shoppers have changed their minds about – becomes the afterlife of consumer choice. Frozen waffles abandoned at the register become an emergency. Melted Popsicles become evidence. Shopping carts cease to be conveniences and become rolling liabilities that must be gathered, roped together, hauled into elevators, and returned again, and again, and again, like Sisyphus with a loyalty card.

The book is most alive when it lets those objects testify. It understands that the supermarket’s moral life is not hidden in a boardroom alone. It is also in the gap between a shopper saying she no longer wants the fried chicken and the worker who must decide whether the chicken becomes dinner, waste, or one more thing to resent. It is in the small mercy of a forbidden chair dragged out after the managers leave. It is in the paper bag that slices fingers while advertising sustainability by implication. It is in a cash drawer that will not open for a return and a screen that says the transaction worked while refusing to release the money. A weaker book would have turned all this into symbolism too quickly. Larson lets the thing remain a thing long enough for the meaning to bruise.

Her prose is procedural prose with a pulse. She does not decorate the job. She clocks it. Scan, bag, void, override, sweep, restock, call for help, apologize, stand, ache, repeat. Her sentences often move by practical sequence: what happened, what it required, what it cost, what it exposed. When a sharp line lands, it lands because the shift has done the setup. The style is not especially lush, nor should it be. A fancier book might have turned the checkstand into metaphor at the first beep. Here, the metaphor waits its turn in line, which is where this book knows most things begin.

One of Larson’s gifts is her ear for register patois. The language of the store is half workplace slang, half survival spell: the late lunch that makes time seem shorter, the day off that becomes “my Friday,” the machine haunted by “ghost groceries,” the forbidden chair brought out after managers leave. The jokes are not decoration. They are what pain sounds like when it is trying to stay employed. Larson can be funny without asking the reader to relax. A supervisor during a Super Bowl rush becomes an accidental field commander. A self-checkout repair requires filming nothing happening. A banker’s almost-smile feels like admission into a secret society. The store is ridiculous because it is brutal, and brutal because everyone must keep treating the ridiculous as policy.

Larson sketches people by what they carry, sip, avoid, endure, and say when the clock refuses to move. Cindy, the elderly bagger with bright makeup, a bottle of lukewarm Diet Coke, and a past as a baton-twirling majorette, loves her customers and cannot afford to stop working. Bonnie, nicknamed Radio, chatters warmly at the register, breaks dumb rules to help shoppers, and seems to carry the store’s better self until her sudden death leaves her scheduled checkstand crossed off with a pen. George, the security guard, can be punitive, hilarious, tender, and frightened, sometimes before the doors are locked. Darth, Lucia, Willow, Stanley, Scarlet, Gordon, Kevin, Aurelie, Emery, Paula, Whitney – they arrive with props, injuries, habits, wages, grudges, and one-liners. Larson gives them not lacquered virtue, but the more respectful dignity of contradiction.

That refusal matters. “Cleanup on Aisle Five” is openly pro-worker, but it does not pretend that suffering purifies. Workers mock one another’s injuries, resent callouts, report petty infractions, haze new supervisors, compete over who has it worse, and take out their exhaustion on customers. Larson herself becomes the most persuasive evidence. She begins eager to serve, grateful to feel useful during the pandemic. She becomes skilled, then useful, then respected, then implicated. She lies to managers, voids thefts to protect cashiers, tricks people into tasks, resents late shoppers, grows impatient with trainees, and near the end cannot bring herself to chase an elderly customer who accidentally leaves without paying.

This is the book’s boldest move. Competence does not rescue Larson from the store; it deepens her implication in it. The better she understands the Front End, the more she can protect people, and the more she learns to ration protection. Her authority comes from the fact that she does not preserve herself as the clean observer among the damaged. The job gets into her judgment. It recalibrates sympathy until every body on the floor begins to look like staffing capacity: who can stand, who can fetch carts, who can lift, who can last, who is too old, too injured, too slow, too unstable, too inconveniently human.

The store does not need workers to be cruel. It only needs them tired enough to confuse cruelty with efficiency.

That is more unsettling than the familiar indictment of bad bosses and stingy corporations. Larson knows those are real. But she is after something more intimate and therefore more incriminating. A workplace designed to spend people down does not merely extract labor. It trains everyone to think like the workplace. A panic attack becomes a scheduling crisis. A bathroom break becomes a threat to the break cycle. A sore back becomes a line-management problem. A customer’s loneliness becomes stolen time. A shopper’s hunger becomes shrink. A coworker’s pain becomes one less person who can fetch carts.

The feeling gathers as Larson’s world narrows from the whole store to the few inches between the scanner, the clock, and her own sore heel. She does not simply discover that grocery work is difficult. She discovers that it is skilled, necessary, often meaningful, sometimes noble – and still something she wants to escape. Her pride in becoming a real grocery worker is genuine. So is her desire to get out before the job spends what remains of her patience, arches, and cartilage. The contradiction is not hypocrisy. It is the book’s most honest knowledge. Meaningful work can still be made hard to survive.

The automatic doors keep admitting the needs the country has refused to house elsewhere. A woman who has been beaten eats macaroni and cheese with her hands because she has nowhere else to go. A lonely shopper returns to the checkout line to praise the staff, then traps Larson in the story of a lost love. Workers need dental care, hearing aids, diabetes treatment, rent money, predictable schedules, chairs, and rest. Shoppers need food, bathrooms, warmth, Wi-Fi, help with scams, and someone to absorb the anger that belongs elsewhere. The people assigned to receive social breakdown are themselves living inside it.

Larson’s point is not that the grocery store should refuse care. It is that care has been mispriced. A store can be a community resource. It cannot become a hospital, shelter, pension system, therapist’s office, and union hall simply because it has automatic doors and a cashier trained to smile.

The book’s civic pressure is built into the job. Larson’s critique of self-checkout lands as cities and unions question cashierless systems. Her account of low pay punctures the coupon-book praise of “essential” labor. Her discussion of inflation and consolidation helps explain why shoppers and workers so often mistake one another for the source of their suffering. The cashier is the human face nearest the price tag, the line, the broken station, the missing cart, the rejected payment. Corporate power, like a very successful shoplifter, has already slipped out the door.

Because Larson wants the whole food system in view, “Cleanup on Aisle Five” sometimes burdens itself with more than any one aisle can carry. The supermarket opens onto wages, health insurance, dental care, public benefits, housing, antitrust, private equity, food deserts, workplace surveillance, gun violence, mental health, automation, environmental waste, aging, retirement, public grocery stores, co-ops, and unions. Most of these connections are real. Some are indispensable. Yet the pattern can begin to feel like a conveyor belt: scene, history, policy, indictment, return to the Front End. The reader does not doubt the relevance; the reader sometimes feels the filing system.

There is also a slight imbalance in private weather. Workers receive names, habits, contradictions, jokes, injuries, and histories. Shoppers often appear as interruptions, threats, or emergencies: the abuser, the lonely talker, the confused self-checkout user, the late-night tormentor, the thief, the chooser, the frightened person with nowhere else to go. This is partly the point. From behind the register, customers arrive in a rush of needs and irritations. Still, Larson is more exact about what shoppers do to workers than about who shoppers are once the receipt prints.

The final movement is earned, though its urgency occasionally starts drafting reforms before the scene has finished speaking. Cindy’s collapse behind checkstand number one, after Larson has left TGS and returned as a shopper, is the right final image: a beloved elderly bagger whose love of the job should not obscure the scandal of needing it into her ninth decade. From there, Larson argues for living wages, steadier schedules, redesigned checkstands, paid leave, health care, retirement security, limits on surveillance, self-checkout regulation, union power, antitrust enforcement, and alternative grocery models. The demands are persuasive. They are also more ledger than drama. The earlier chapters leave contradictions alive and stinging. The conclusion wants them repaired.

Still, Larson earns her insistence that dignity is material, not ceremonial. It is not a candy bar during Employee Appreciation Week. Not a raffle for a deli gift card. Not a shopper saying thank you. Not a memorial post praising a woman who never complained.

Dignity requires equipment.

It is a chair before the body breaks. A paycheck before the pantry empties. A schedule that allows life to happen somewhere besides the break room. Health care before the toothache becomes personality. Retirement before the ambulance pulls up outside the store.

That ambulance is where the book finds its lasting force. Cindy’s name is crossed off a schedule. Bonnie becomes a ghost story in the walk-in cooler. The clock keeps moving, or seems not to. New workers arrive in crisp uniforms, not yet faded by detergent and dread. Customers still want receipts, shrimp trays, hot chicken, coffee, refunds, quarters, free bread, bottled water, someone to listen, someone to blame. The store keeps opening.

Larson makes that daily fact newly difficult to bear. The book is not always selective, but it has uncommon moral grain and a cashier’s earned suspicion of clean answers. My final rating is 88/100, which corresponds to 4/5 stars: a strongly favorable score for a book whose best pages turn the checkout line into a map of American dependence, fatigue, and denial. The shopper thinks the register is where the errand ends. Larson shows it is where the cost has already been scanned but charged to the wrong account – under the scanner, beside the paper bags, next to the name crossed off for the morning shift.

[anarcho-lesbian]

I worked in a grocery store pharmacy and grocery stores are truly hell on earth sometimes.

[Lydia]

Cleanup on Aisle Five is a valuable look at the grocery industry from the ground level. I think people who have worked retail will find a lot of it painfully familiar, while people who haven't had a low-wage hourly job will get a much better sense of what that work actually demands. Larson's call to action at the end is directed at everyone who shops at grocery stores, since the way we shop is connected to the way these businesses operate and the way their employees are treated.

I came into this book with a somewhat skeptical perspective, and that had less to do with Larson's observations than with her position as the person making them. She's a published author, college educated, and had already built a career writing and organizing around issues of economic hardship. She certainly had other options available to her before she took this job, and ultimately chose to leave TGS after a year. That's very different from someone whose low-wage job isn't an experiment or a temporary detour, but their only realistic option for years or even a lifetime.

I've worked in grocery retail in several different roles, including cashier, service desk cashier, floor supervisor, and eventually store administration at Kroger, so I was in a pretty good position to recognize when Larson was accurately describing the realities of retail work. There were many moments in this book when I was nodding along, thinking: Yep, that's exactly how it works.

Fortunately, my skepticism decreased as I read. The problems Larson describes at the store felt very real: employees distracted and irritable because they're worried about affording groceries, people working through injuries because they can't afford not to, customers taking their frustrations out on the employee standing in front of them, and employees who are struggling themselves but will still stop what they're doing to help someone else. Those parts felt very familiar to me.

What ultimately won me over was that Larson seemed to genuinely learn from the experience. The pressure of the work appears to have pushed her beyond the high-minded idea of a grocery store as a community institution and into a much messier understanding of what it's like to actually keep one running when you're understaffed, dealing with difficult customers, and answering to management. She also seems conscious of the privilege that allowed her to eventually walk away, while using the experiences of other employees to show what this kind of work looks like when you don't have that option.

The self-checkout discussion was one of my favorite sections. Larson makes the point that these machines don't necessarily eliminate labor; they often just redistribute it. Customers are expected to scan and bag, while employees have to monitor multiple machines and deal with all the problems they create. And here's the part that really rings true: stores aren't necessarily interested in training those employees to become more skilled at fixing the machines. If you teach a clerk how to actually diagnose and repair the technology, you've potentially created a more skilled position that deserves more pay. So instead, employees can be left with just enough training to keep things moving.

But the larger point about "unskilled" retail labor goes beyond self-checkout. Any clerk has to know a surprising amount to operate a register effectively. There are dozens of procedures, exceptions, codes, policies, payment issues, product questions, and situations that require judgment. The fact that someone can eventually make it look easy doesn't mean the job is unskilled.

Larson's discussion of the lack of training also felt extremely familiar. People can be thrown onto registers with very little preparation because nobody has the time to train them properly. I particularly related to the moments when Ann realizes afterward that she should have explained something to an employee instead of simply fixing the problem herself. I've absolutely been there. Sometimes you know that teaching someone would be better in the long run, but you're already overwhelmed or frustrated, and it feels easier to just do the thing yourself and move on. And the discussion of supervisor training (or lack thereof)? Hahaha. So real.

The discussion of time unexpectedly hit me hard. I've been out of the retail world for several years now, and I have much more flexibility over my time than I did then. Reading about how an hourly employee's entire day revolves around the clock brought me right back to how difficult that lack of control can be. When your lunch is scheduled, your shift starts and ends at a specific time, and your schedule can change with little notice, something as simple as keeping a doctor appointment can feel impossible. It's one of those things that people with more flexible jobs can completely forget is a reality for hourly workers.

I also appreciated how Larson uses little things that happen in the store as springboards into much larger conversations about the grocery industry. She does this throughout the book. For example, the discussion of "gobacks" (items that customers leave behind - we called them "rejects") becomes a way to talk about consumer choice and corporate consolidation. There may be dozens of cereals on the shelf, but many of them are ultimately produced by just a handful of enormous companies. You may think you're choosing between different grocery stores, but many of those stores are owned by the same corporations. The book does a good job of showing how much of our apparent consumer choice exists within a system that is already highly concentrated.

The discussion of wage theft was another thing that stuck with me. I'm familiar with working off the clock. (I still do it on occasion, usually with the justification that I'm "making life easier for myself later.") But thinking about that behavior as wage theft rather than just something employees sometimes do gave me a different way of looking at it. It's pretty disturbing how easily unpaid work can become normalized.

I did think there was one area where the book felt underbaked: grocery pickup and delivery. Larson talks about i-grocery as another example of a convenience technology that is supposed to make things easier but may not actually work as advertised, in much the same way she discusses self-checkout. I'm not convinced. Curbside pickup and delivery have exploded since the pandemic, and unlike self-checkout, I think they've actually become a lasting part of how people shop. Grocery stores are heavily promoting these services, they're relatively inexpensive for customers, and the infrastructure behind them continues to expand. I also think the rise of pickup and delivery has changed the social dynamics of grocery stores, since people now have the option of avoiding much of the interaction that comes with shopping in person. I would have liked to see much more discussion of this, especially since Larson was working in grocery retail during the pandemic.

The book's final recommendations worked well for me because Larson spends so much of the book showing what happens when workers don't have these protections: higher wages, more predictable schedules, PTO and health benefits, better injury prevention and store design, stronger unions, and enforcement of antitrust laws. These aren't abstract ideas after you've spent many pages watching people struggle because they can't afford to miss a shift, can't plan their lives around unpredictable schedules, or can't afford to treat an injury.

I'm especially on board with stronger antitrust enforcement and unionization. The idea that a handful of corporations can control huge portions of our food supply is troubling, not just for workers but for consumers. And while I wasn't completely convinced by the idea of publicly operated grocery stores, I thought the book made a good case for at least considering alternatives to the current system.

Overall, I enjoyed the cast of characters and the whirlwind of Larson figuring out how to lead in this environment. I also appreciated that she seemed to genuinely learn from the experience. For someone like me, I appreciated that she used experiences I was already familiar with as a way to build a broader framework for understanding why these problems exist and how they connect to much larger economic structures.

[Venita]

This is an eye-opening look at the realities of food retail work. Larson shines a light on the physical exhaustion, mental stress, and constant demands faced by the people who keep grocery stores running every day. After reading this book, it's impossible not to have a deeper appreciation and respect for the check out workers, the cart gatherers and others holding everything together behind the scenes for very low pay.. A thoughtful reminder that every trip to the grocery store is supported by hard work we too often overlook.

Friends.....reshelf that stuff you decide you don't want yourself, you have no idea how much work and stress a pile of "go-backs" can cause and for goodness sake don't show up five minutes before closing to start your shopping!

[Becca]

What a cute little project. 🙄

Tone deaf.

[Jeff]

C.S. Lewis Warned Us About This. C.S. Lewis wrote in 1949 that "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." Here, we have an entire book of exactly that kind of elitist, disdainful tyranny.

Larson openly admits to being a thief in several instances within this text. Her own actions as documented within this text show her to be a hypocrite. She actively denies objective reality in claiming that FDR's support of unionism was a good thing, when it actually and objectively extended the Great Depression nearly twice as long as it would have gone without FDR's price-fixing policies, including his support of unions.

And yet she is *absolutely sure* she knows *exactly* what would help the very people she had to lower herself to be around because she had no other choice and had to find any possible work available to her. Truly, this is the worst part of this entire narrative, is Larson's elitist disdain for everything and everyone around her that is positively *dripping* from these pages. She alone knows what will save these people, and she alone will force them to accept her help whether they want her involvement or not.

I've worked in a supermarket myself - apparently longer than Larson did, as I worked there for 2? 3? yrs at the border of HS and college, though I do admit that this was 20 yrs before Larson did and in fact was at the time one of the supermarkets best known for its customer service - a culture of customer service that was deeply ingrained in my psyche and has served me well in all professional ventures both paid and not ever since. I was a bagger at Publix back when Publix was still expanding through North Ga - indeed, my own mom had worked at another Publix store closer to Atlanta before helping open the store in my hometown, which I then worked for (under her same store manager even) a couple of years later. Interestingly, while Larson covers a bit of rival Piggly Wiggly's history, she never once mentions Publix - despite Publix actually originating in part from Piggly Wiggly. (Publix's founder, George Jenkins, had rapidly risen through the ranks at Piggly Wiggly before starting out on his own as the Depression was still worsening, and in fact a few of his former colleagues at Piggly Wiggly were among his very first investors.) Now, don't get me wrong -Publix of the 2020s is doing several things "Mr. George" is very likely rolling in his grave enough to be a pretty decent fan in this Florida heat, and even then, shortly after his death, was already likely doing some things he didn't exactly like. But the culture of absolute commitment to the highest customer service was still a thing then, and in fact prevented at least some of the issues that Larson writes about in this book. (Cart collection in particular. Was never a problem back then, because baggers were required to walk every cart out with the customer and bring it back - and were prevented upon pain of summary termination from accepting any tip for doing so. Which actually led to a fun story of my own actions in this era, where I literally chased down a car. Granted, it was in the parking lot - but it *was* moving, and I *was* able to run it down before it got to the road. They/ I had forgotten one of their bags at the cash register, and I was able to get it to them. Nearly 30 years later, I couldn't move half as fast if I wanted to. ;) )

If your politics align more closely with Larson's - who claims to be one of the activists who was leading the charge for Federal student loan "forgiveness" in shifting the burden of repaying loans students voluntarily took out to every American taxpayer and thereby both raising prices for everyone and lowering their relative income via inflation - you will probably enjoy this book a lot more than I did. It still is far from a Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr, which was a genuinely insightful look at grocery stores and how their modern incarnations came to be, but this text may in fact be something you enjoy, and it will absolutely confirm your own biases. For those more along my own lines - I literally have a tattoo of one of the subheadings within Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand tattooed on one of the wrists I'm using to type this review - I think I've made it clear here that this is a book you will more likely want to defenestrate... and really, there's nothing actually here worth reading beyond seeing some experiences as a grocery store worker during the insanity of the global societal collapse over COVID.

And that is actually the final star deduction here - the intense (and not mentioned in the description) look at COVID. Even now these 5+ yrs later, it is a subject I do not care to read about. Ever. I've had a standing one star deduction for books that mention it at all ever since, and while I've relaxed it for passing mentions, this book uses it quite heavily and therefore still gets the deduction.

So, just to be explicit within my own rating framework, let's make sure we detail each star deduction, shall we:

-1 star for elitism. I cannot stress enough how very *dripping* this text is with "I'm better than everyone around me, why don't they know this?"
-1 star for open hypocrisy - even while praising unions and actively proclaiming that this store needed one, Larson also actively shows where a union would have done (as they always do in this modern era) exactly jack and shit to actually help these workers in this store.
-1 star for openly admitting to actively stealing from her own employer. I mean, kudos for the balls to openly admit something that is at least possibly still within any relevant statute of limitations. I'm not a lawyer at all, but I sincerely hope you had one for your jurisdiction read every word presented here. Even if legally "cleared" though, this is still a moral failing that should be resoundingly condemned.
-1 star for heavy and undisclosed discussion of COVID. This one may be the most ticky-tacky star deduction of the lot, but hell, I'm fairly certain I'll have more people agreeing with me on this deduction than any other.

Not recommended.

[G]

[ARC review]

Ann Larson does a great job covering the modern supermarket, depicting the semi-controlled chaos without totally befuddling the reader. And her note at the beginning that the difficulty of tracking all the names is part of the point was much appreciated. There were a few points on which I wish she'd gone into more detail. When she mentions big business arguing that keeping employees low-paid and -benefited is the only way to keep prices affordable, it would have been great to get into the numbers on why that isn't true. But this isn't a book on economy, it's a book about working in a supermarket and how everything in society is connected - from health care (or lack thereof) to gun laws (or lack thereof) to product monopolies to union organizing, and how difficult it is to fight for change when you're coming off an eight-days-on-your-feet week that still won't pay all your bills. And Larson acknowledges that her inherent privilege - she's not going to be a market lifer and has more options than many of her coworkers - creates a distance she wasn't able to fully overcome.

I also enjoyed this book on a personal note because of how well it matched my own experience working in a supermarket. I was a cashier/bagger at a big chain (rhymes with Hop&Drop) for a few years during and directly after college, years before the pandemic. I remember noting the divide: there were the College Kids like me, who worked a couple shifts a week for drinking money, weren't planning to make a career in the supermarket and probably weren't considered very highly by the other workers (fair enough in my case - when Larson mentions ringing up wrong things in a panic because no one including the customer knows what green vegetable this is and the line is eight carts deep, well, let's just say I was ringing up a lot of spinach that may or may not have been spinach). Then there were the people for whom supermarket work was their career - many were older, and as in Larson's account, many insisted they were bagging groceries in their 70s to give themselves something to do, while also struggling with the physical demands of the job and worrying about small pay checks.

The store I started in, though, was union. IIRC minimum wage in my state at the time was $7.25 - this store paid something like $9, and $11 on Sundays. Which felt like king's ransom to me at the time. I don't remember what the union dues were, can't have been much, but I would grumble about the missing $10 or whatever it was, which felt like a lot coming out of a $200 pay check. At first I didn't see why I had to pay in to something I wasn't planning to use.

Then a friend at the store was fired over nonsense. She went to the union and the union got her her job back. At the time, I was impressed that it would bother going to bat for a super-part-time employee everyone knew would be gone in a year or two. And then I graduated, and for a year or so after college kept my supermarket job, but transferred to a store closer to home (taking my rate of pay with me). The new store wasn't union.

I hadn't realized: every time I got that $11 Sunday rate I was using the union. Not long after transferring I was talking with other cashiers and realized they were getting minimum wage seven days a week. I was making manager money!

All this to say: what Larson learns in this book is true. The drudgery, the bonding with coworkers as fellow foot soldiers in a war, the customers apparently enraged by the act of grocery shopping, the out-to-lunch upper management, the way your feet ache after hours pacing your cash register zone, being yelled at for reading gossip magazines at the register (sorry not sorry), creative writing majors scribbling story notes on receipt paper (sorry not sorry), the moments of genuine interest and solidarity with customers, the way a slammed shift at least went faster than a dead one, the strange intimacy of seeing what another person plans to subsist on. The quirks of personality and high staff turnover. The employees' stealth chairs (if there's one thing that needs to be legally mandated this minute it's letting employees SIT and USE THE BATHROOM).The lousy wages made somewhat less lousy thanks to the existence of a union.

Larson is right that everyone should have to work a retail job such as supermarket-ing at least once in their lives. Even if they don't get a really solid book out of it.

[Lisa-Michele]

Larson took a supermarket cashier job in part to earn a living and in part to expose what she sees as appalling working conditions there. Her attitude from page one tainted her findings for me. “Working at a supermarket seemed like a way to serve my community during the pandemic,” she writes, and within days of being hired, Larson began writing a book about the work. “But the physical and mental demands of spending forty hours a week behind the register made writing seem impossible.” She has a college degree and a failed academic career.

I worked multiple hourly wage jobs as a younger person getting my college degree, including motel maid, c-store clerk, fast food server/cashier, and receptionist. I recognized two things from Larson’s descriptions: the pride of earning money in a service job and the loss of dignity in serving the public. “At the supermarket,” Larson writes, “I found a microcosm of society: a place of brutality and violence as well as solidarity and the promise of change.” Brutality seems too strong a word. There’s no question that servers in any organization encounter abuse from the sea of angry and short-tempered customers. I didn’t find it unique to the supermarket industry. Similarly, it is well-known that hourly wage employees in service industries are paid low wages and have inadequate health benefits, a point which Larson emphasizes for about 100 pages. Larson also writes about the effects of schedule unpredictability, high turnover, and challenges of automation.

“The retail industry views workers as widgets that have no lives beyond the store. By plugging them into the schedule according to a store’s immediate needs and giving them virtually no authority over when they work, companies only pay workers when they are absolutely necessary.” I agree with the theme, but every profession has elements of this unpredictability. What I was hoping for in this “expose” was a rigorous approach to her fact-finding based on integrity and some thoughtful solutions about how supermarkets could improve working conditions. She lacked integrity because her intentions were to write a book, not to follow the employer’s rules.

“I would work on being a more sympathetic colleague and supervisor, even if that meant breaking rules and policies.” At the store, Larson voids certain transactions as if they never occurred when customers steal; she refuses to chase thieves out of the store or report employees who cheat because she assumes “they have a good reason”; she skips through necessary trainings and lies about training completion; and she covers for other employees’ misdeeds. A Robin Hood complex? “…treating those just above me in the hierarchy as a stand-in for everything that was wrong at TGS seemed logical at the time. It also felt good.”

I did learn interesting things about the specifics of employee mistreatment, such as the burden of “product go backs”, how most workers take as many shifts as possible to cover their rent payments, how unforgiving hourly wage jobs are for people with chronic health conditions, and how self-checkout actually complicates an employee’s job. Coincidentally, Larson was working and writing about a Utah store (unnamed) with which I’m familiar and I have a good opinion of that business. I needed more from Larson. “…as a society, we must take up the larger questions about how capitalism leads to bad outcomes for everyone.” Hmmm. I think I will need to read another supermarket book or two before I draw any further conclusions.

[CatReader]

Ann Larson is an American writer. Her 2026 book Cleanup on Aisle Five is a memoir of her pandemic year working as a cashier and supervisor in an upscale Utah grocery store she anonymizes as 'TSG' (The Grocery Store). Having also previously lived in Utah during the pandemic, my guess is that she worked at a Harmon's location, perhaps the one in downtown SLC with two levels, which isn't exactly an Erewhon but is the closest SLC comes to that. A Dan's location is also a possibility, though Dan's featured upscale prices without upscale product. (Personally, on my moderate income while living in SLC, I was always a Smith's (Kroger chain) sale ad shopper, and seldom ventured into a Harmon's, Dan's, or Whole Foods location unless I needed a perishable speciality item that Smith's didn't carry.)

I wasn't particularly impressed with this book, compared to others in this genre I've read (see further reading below). There are a lot of truisms that it seemed to take Larson months of working at TSG to understand, like how grocery work is low-paying, how everyone has a story, and how inherently people can be so out of touch with anyone else's perspective besides their own. I'm glad the experience working at TSG helped broaden the author's perspective.

Further reading:
Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in AmericaGrocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America by Michael Ruhlman - about the business of grocery stores in general, but focused largely on the small Northeast Ohio chain Heinen's
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land
Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate by Rose George
Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth
The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David Shipler

[Book Club of One]

During the 2020 COVID Pandemic, with her career and past work experiences stalled, Ann Larson got a job as a cashier and supervisor at a supermarket. Cleanup in Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register focuses on Larson’s experience in this role. Throughout the narrative Larson combines snippets from the lives of her colleagues, many suffering from various health problems, with some minor exploration of the history of grocery stores, their operations, position as ad-hoc community centers and inherently capitalist structures. It is a combination, that while focused, would have benefited with greater detail. Especially with the growing societal concerns with automation, frequently seen in grocery store self-checkouts.

Larson’s background has positioned her well to write this book, having worked in academics and journalism, as well as her work with nonprofits, she is a co-founder of the Debt Collective, a debtor’s union focused on making education publicly funded, universal healthcare and guaranteed housing. It is this activist or communal mindset that makes Larson very empathetic as she enters her new career in the grocery store. She seeks to both find her place, understand the processes and make what difference she can. And the learning curve is steep, there are set policies and procedures to do most things but learning how to enact those, using the computer and register system requires practice and experience. Grocery stores are set up with a privileged class of managers and administrators deciding much of the day to day priorities while an underclass of part time or near full time workers try to make ends meet by scrounging what hours they can at their much lower wages. Larson frequently reflects on the amount most of the workers are making at the hours are long. And staff is highly variable, with high turnover and little notice of calling off or quitting.

There are some comparisons to other companies and their tracking of employees, but cashiers and baggers are under a great deal of supervision from their colleagues, management and the customers.

I worked in grocery stores for over a decade, and I recall the feeling of being monitored at all times and the need to keep up an appearance of busy-ness lest I be chastised or sent over to do other work. There were also the lean times when the store was far from busy where hours were reduced, the space between Christmas and New Year’s being one of these quiet points.

An illuminating look at behind the scenes work at grocery stores, but for those who have been paying attention or care about the plight of others, not much new. But, that feels to be the point. Do you consider those that wait on or assist you in stores human?

This book will appeal to those looking for modern workplace memoirs, grocery stores methods or operations, and ethical considerations under capitalism.


I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.

[Leslie Oberhaus]

Reminiscent of the classic Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, Cleanup on Aisle Five is an inside look at retail work centered on the supermarket.

Journalist Ann Larson worked as a supermarket cashier and front end supervisor for a year during the COVID-19 pandemic and initially thought the experience might make a good article about working in a public role during this time. She quickly realized there was much more to write about as she observed the physical, emotional, and financial struggles of her colleagues and learned first-hand how skilled the "unskilled" job of cashier can be. What she has put together is well done, a book that is an eye-opening memoir combined with journalism and research.

I learned some interesting history about supermarkets and empathized my way through Larson's memories of learning the registers and self-checkout error codes, her colleagues' heartbreaking struggles to make ends meet, and the disconcerting battle between wanting customers to go away and remembering that you yourself are a customer at times, too. (I have not been a supermarket cashier but I have years of retail experience in department stores and as a pharmacy technician in CVS stores and supermarket pharmacies. I am the product of a blue collar household also so this is all all too familiar.)

There is a lot of interesting information in the research about the way the supermarkets operate that can raise questions on community, policy, the environment, and more, but the most important message in Cleanup on Aisle Five is the human one. The thoughts on wages for "unskilled" workers, time off policies, and management tactics are important conversations and the reminders about dignity and compassion are even more so.

I've noticed other reviews commenting that actual interviews with the author's coworkers would have made the book stronger. I understand this point but also understand the author's statement in the book that while working at the store she couldn't imagine asking any of them to talk to her for an interview about the job that so exhausted them after any of the long days was finally over. It's true that the information and perspective we have on her colleagues is limited. Would the book be even stronger with more about them? Probably, but what it's fair to assume that we have is authentic and that works for me.

I received an early digital copy of this book via NetGalley and I'm leaving my review voluntarily.

[Bookworm]

While I have worked in retail, I never worked in a grocery store and am grateful for the people who showed up to do so (or deliver, or shop for others), etc. despite the enormous risk to many during the worst of COVID. So when I saw this book I thought it would be an interesting read. What has changed, and what hasn't? With recent cents it seemed like this would be a good read.

Author Larson lost her job and decided to work at her local grocery store for money, to do her part, etc. This is a mix of memoir, commentary, history, etc. You get her own personal experiences (including a pooping incident that would basically explain the title), discussions of working in this field, what it is like, stories about her co-workers, what might be a path forward, etc.

Agree that it's a bit of a mixed bag. If you've never worked in a job like this you will probably be shocked at HOW hard it can be: the physical toll, the mundane work, the "weird" (interpret it as you like) people you work with, the weirder customers, etc. Imagine handling that in the middle of a deadly pandemic AND wondering if you'll keep your job, too. But I also did feel like it was a bit of the author occasionally treating her co-workers like an anthropological study and that was a little weird.

Overall, though, it is an important work if only to have a record of experiences of working in a position and situation like this. And it is hard to disagree with Larson's conclusions that more work needs to be done in helping these workers get better wages, healthcare, job conditions, etc. And what that looks like may not resemble her experiences at all in the age of AI and increasingly sophisticated robotic technology, etc.

Certainly recommend it if you have any interest at all about what it was like to work in a job like this at the worst parts of COVID, working in a grocery store in general, etc. although depending on your experiences and memories (of not just the pandemic but if you've worked hourly jobs like this), it may also be a tough read.

Library borrow and that was best for me.

[Ken Dowell]

After reading this you won’t look at your local supermarket the same way again. And you’ll be really nice to the checkout cashier.

The author, Ann Larson, returned to her home in Utah and spent a year working as a supervisor in the front end (checkout area) of a supermarket. During COVID no less. Her book recalls Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2002 classic Nickled and Dimed. It’s kind of an update. And things haven’t gotten better. Clean Up on Aisle five is short of the depth and insight of Nickled and Dimed. At times it seems like 200+ pages of someone complaining about their job.

But there are real issues here. I was shocked by this statistic. “A 2022 report by Economic Roundtable showed that about three quarters of workers at Kroger, the second largest grocery company in the country, struggled to afford regular meals.” The American work ethnic tells us that if you work hard you’ll not only get by, you’ll better yourself. Larson describes a group of co-workers exhausted from their labor who can barely get by on their earnings.

A major issue, as it is everywhere in America, is healthcare. The cashiers and baggers have dental problems, back aches, sore feet and tired muscles. Some can’t afford the needed contribution to the company healthcare plan and even among those who can some can’t pay the deductible. One of the cashiers Larson writes about dies at her work station.

Another revelation was about the impact of self-checkout. While everyone suspects it was envisioned as a way to cut staff, Larson claims that the need to babysit the machines actually created more work. She comments “Self checkout gave shoppers and workers more reasons to despise each other.”

All and all it is not a pretty picture. Nor was the cleanup on aisle five. That involved ketchup.

[Charlie Gessner]

I’ve had the pleasure of reading several books dedicated to the plight of the working class. This however was not one of them. Maybe it was my preconceived notion, but I thought this book would speak to me the same way that Stephanie Land’s book (Maid) did. It did not. What we get is Larson taking the job of a supermarket employee who becomes a supervisor, and spends at least half of the book complaining about everything from workers who call out sick, to middle and upper management not having a clue as to how a store is supposed to work with its employees, or dealing with shoppers who come in late so that they can’t close the store on time. Don’t’ get me wrong; I realize that the book is supposed to center around the grievances of this industry and its workers, but it just comes off as constant whining for the first half of the book.

Does that mean it’s all negative? No. At about the halfway mark, the book turns a bit and centers specifically on some of its employees and the hardships they have getting by (I wanted more of this). It also talks about the history of the industry and how national grocery chains came to be. In the final pages, Larson almost offers a dissertation on what is wrong with the industry and actually offers a blueprint of what the industry needs to do (better wages, better health care plans, possibly union organizing, etc…). Again — THIS is what I came for, and I just didn’t get enough of it.

If you’re looking for books to check out about the plight of the American working class, start with “Nickel & Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich or “Maid” by Stephanie Land. Both are much better reads. While Cleanup on Aisle Five had its moments, it didn’t deliver. To be honest, 3 stars might be a gift.

[Nichole]

This is a great perspective on what is often an overlooked part of our daily lives. The author sets out here to take her journalist skills into a core of our society: the grocery store. She gets a job as a front end cashier and superviser at the peak of the pandemic. What she experiences there is how mass surveillance and chronic pain rules our lives.

I was reading this and thinking of the reddit forum IATA because everyone kind of sucks. But also, this is what happens when we are underpaid, exploited, surveilled, and forced to work while in disabling pain. Capitalism is the real asshole here and it is clear that under capitalism there is no dignity in any job.

I liked the details that the author gives us. What is expected of a front end cashier in a busy store is clear here and the impacts of that job are stark. Everyone has health problems. Nobody can afford to rest and all employees [except maybe the teenagers and execs] are living in poverty. This is infuriating and unacceptable, yet that is what we deem acceptable nevertheless when we take our walks through the grocery stores without a wider perspective.

Working under capitalism turns us all into cops and makes our room for empathy smaller every interaction we have with each other. This is a sad book. Sad because the ways we are forced to live with no worker protections or even respect.

This is great for musing on what a store could be. What should stores of the future look like? I don’t mean the horrendous people-free, hyper-surveilled stores of amazon’s dream; but stores that were centered around community and that protected workers.

Thank you to the publisher for a gifted copy of this book.

[Linda]

I love the one star reviews from readers who think that people in the U.S. should work their retail job with crap pay and crappier (or no) benefits until they die from whatever disease they can’t afford to get treatment for... and LIKE IT. All hail our corporate overlords, amen.

So five stars it is! I was leaning that way already. I was dubious when the blurb mentioned Barbara Ehrenreich, but the author actually mentions her in the book, and is true to Barbara’s spirit, and her mission. Maybe even a little truer, because Ann took this job not just to write about working in a supermarket-- she needed a job, and this was the only one she could find during the pandemic. She couldn’t afford a car. She walked to work. Okay, it was only 6 blocks, but still….

Just when I thought the grueling physicality and public service aspects (never forget: hell is other people) were turning her into another grumpy corporate drone, she caught herself, and started being subversive in amusing ways that helped protect those under her direct supervision from some of the bad ideas of management.

I believe she only spent a little over a year at the grocery, but her position as a front-end supervisor gave her an eagle eye view of everyone from baggers, cashiers, and stockers to the cash office workers, department heads, store managers, and corporate types who dropped in occasionally to ask mind-boggling questions (safety initiative of the month? That’s a thing that we have?).

Recommended for anyone who has worked retail and knows how the sausage is made, and especially for anyone who hasn’t.